Don't leave me alone

A few days ago, while only half-listening to the television news, one report suddenly took me back more than thirty years.

It concerned a terrible act of violence that had taken place in a town in Northern Italy. A family tragedy ending with the perpetrator taking his own life. Among the details mentioned by the journalist, there was one that seemed almost incidental, almost incomprehensible beside the enormity of what had happened: before killing himself, the man had also killed his dog.

That was enough.

I experienced what could only be described as a flashback. A very distant memory, almost completely buried, came back to me with surprising clarity.

At the time, I was still working in the Biella area. It concerned a rather complex estate, involving a Notary from Casale Monferrato, who has since passed away, and myself. Some of the heirs lived in Monferrato, while the principal heir was one of my clients from the Biella area.

I will not mention the village or the names of those involved. Many years have passed and almost everyone connected with that story is now gone.

The deceased was a prominent farmer from one of the villages in the Monferrato hills, an area well known for its wine production. He owned a great deal of land and had built up a considerable estate. He was one of the leading farmers in the area.

By then, he was an elderly man.

He had no children, and there was no one who would truly carry on his farm, his life’s work, those vineyards and fields to which he was deeply attached.

One day, he decided to take his own life.

He shot himself with his hunting rifle.

But before doing so, he shot his dog.

It was his hunting dog, the one that regularly accompanied him on hunting trips and, presumably, on countless days throughout his life.

Of course, I cannot know what passed through that man’s mind during those final hours.

No one can.

And yet that detail struck me then, and it has stayed with me for more than thirty years.

During the years I later spent in Monferrato, I came to understand very well the bond that can exist in these rural areas between a man and his dog.

It may be a hunting dog or a truffle dog. The difference is not so great.

For a hunter, a good dog is an inseparable companion. For a truffle hunter, the bond can be even stronger: years spent together, a mutual understanding built on gestures, calls and silence. The man watches the dog, and the dog understands the man. They walk together through woods and countryside for entire days.

It is not simply an animal living in the same house.

It is a companion through life.

And so, when I think back to that elderly farmer, I cannot help imagining him confronted with the terrible decision he had made.

Perhaps he thought about his farm, which no one would continue. About his land. His house. Everything he had built and which would pass to others.

And perhaps he thought about the dog as well.

I do not know whether he hesitated. I do not know whether that presence made what he was about to do even harder.

I can only imagine that, in the disturbed mind of a man who had reached an extreme decision, another anguish may have emerged: the thought of leaving him behind, alone.

The dog that had waited for him every day.

The dog that had followed him through fields and woods.

The dog that, in all likelihood, would have gone on waiting for him the following day.

Perhaps the man imagined that the dog would suffer, that it would look for its master, that it would not understand why he never came back.

And in the tragic and certainly altered logic of those final moments, perhaps he believed he had found a solution to that as well.

To take the dog with him.

There is nothing rational about an act like this, and it would be wrong to try to justify it. Yet behind some extreme human actions there sometimes remains something which, even though it cannot truly be explained, continues to trouble and question us.

What stayed with me was that dog.

Curiously, that estate later had an entirely different and very personal consequence for me.

It was precisely through that matter, the professional relationships that developed from it and a series of circumstances that followed that, indirectly, the path began which would eventually lead me to leave the Biella area and move to Casale Monferrato.

At the time, of course, I could not have known that.

I was simply dealing with an estate.

More than thirty years later, while listening to a news report on television, a single sentence was enough to bring back that man, those hills and, above all, that dog.

Perhaps because professional memory preserves legal acts, people, estates and families.

But sometimes what remains most vividly is a single detail.

And that detail, even after so many years, continues to tell a story.